Jonathan Karp

My scholarly interests center on the roles that Jews have played as both economic
and cultural middlemen, that is to say, as transmitters, translators, interpreters
and entrepreneurs in the realms of commerce and culture. I address the basic question
of how, in recent centuries, Jews have adapted to the modernizing circumstances of
capitalism and how they perceived themselves and were perceived by others as economic
actors.

Along these lines, my monograph, The Politics of Jewish Commerce (Cambridge University
Press, 2008), examines shifting ideological constructions of the Jews as commercial
agents in the literature of European political economy from the middle of the seventeenth
to the middle of the nineteenth centuries. My next book, entitled Chosen Surrogates:
A Class and Cultural Analysis of Black-Jewish Relations, analyzes the ethnic and cultural
dimensions of Jewish middleman functionality in twentieth-century urban America and
focuses on, inter alia, the place of Jews and African Americans in the business and
art of twentieth-century popular music.

"Brokering a Rock 'n' Roll International: Jewish Record Men in the US and UK," in
Purchasing Power: The Economics of Jewish History, edited by Rebecca Kobrin and Adam
Teller (University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming in 2014).

"Jews, Nobility and Usury in Luther's Germany," in Jewish Culture in Early Modern
Europe: Essays in Honor of David Ruderman, edited by Richard Cohen, Natalie Dohrmann,
Elhanan Reiner and Adam Shear (Hebrew Union College Press, 2014): 181-92

"Can Economic History Date the Inception of Jewish Modernity?," in The Economy in
Jewish History: New Perspectives on the Interrelationship between Ethnicity and Economic
Life, edited by Gideon Reuveni and Sarah Wobick-Segev (Berghahn, 2011): 23-42.

"Ethnic Role Models and Chosen Peoples: Philosemitism in African American Culture,"
in Philosemitism in History, edited by Jonathan Karp and Adam Sutcliffe (Cambridge
University Press, 2011): 211-34

"Antisemitism in the Age of Mercantilism," in The Oxford History of Antisemitism,
edited by Richard S. Levy and Albert Lindemann (Oxford University Press, 2010): 94-106.

"Of Maestros and Minstrels: American Jewish Composers between Black Vernacular and
European Art Music", in Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Karp, eds., Modern Jewry and the
Arts (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007).